Slowly but surely a revolutionary idea is being put into operation in the most unpromising area of the world.

While more than 100 years ago the Red Cross established the right to healthcare in conflict zones, the right of refugee boys and girls to continue their education, irrespective of borders, has yet to be won.

But this week in the village of Akroum, which is in the extreme north-east corner of Lebanon close to the Syrian border, a group of exiled Syrian teachers teamed up with Akroum's local village school to "timeshare" the building. For several half days each week, outside of normal school hours, they teach the refugee children.

These teachers are unpaid volunteers who are taking children off the streets, preventing many from becoming child labourers or even beggars, and already doing what only education can do – providing the children with hope that there is a future worth preparing for.

Now, a small Scottish charity, Edinburgh Direct Aid – moved by their plight and aware that the language of Lebanese education is French and English and that Syria is Arabic – is delivering textbooks in Arabic to the school and have offered to fund timeshare projects across the country.

The Akroum experiment is a small illustration of what can be done to meet the educational needs of children in the most appalling of situations. It challenges the international community to support a big idea: for the first time in conflict zones providing universal education provisions on a similar basis for all 400,000 school-age children who are now Syrian refugees in Lebanon. By using 1,500 schools dotted across Lebanon in areas where refugees are huddled in tents, prefabricated huts and tenements, this could be achieved.

With the support of the UN secretary-general, Ban Ki-moon, and the education campaigner Malala Yousafzai, an ambitious plan has been drawn up costing $195m (£117m) a year to repeat across Lebanon what the Akroum school and the Syrian exiled teachers have achieved for one small area.

The simplicity of the concept, crafted by Kevin Watkins, director of the UK-based Overseas Development Institute, is that it can be operational within weeks. Instead of having to build new camp schools for refugees, exiled Syrian children will use existing Lebanese schools on this two-shift system. Members of the public have an opportunity to personally donate to make the plan a reality through any one of 500,000 Western Union outlets throughout the world, with the money transfer company matching the first $100,000 (£60,000) donations.

Lebanon is dealing with a refugee crisis on an unimaginable scale. Half of the 2 million Syrians already displaced from their country have fled for neighbouring Lebanon, where they make up one in four of the population. Every month an additional 50,000 make the same journey. But this project has won the support of the Lebanese government, whose prime minister Najib Mikati has this week reiterated his support for the Global Education Initiative,showing that in even the most hopeless of situations it is important to ensure that a generation of children does not miss out on education.

The appeal comes just a week after the second international pledging conference for Syria, which was held in Kuwait City on 15 January and raised only one third of the emergency aid the UN needed. Currently education is the main loser as health, nutrition and shelter take priority in the allocations. Last year only one pound in six of the appeals for education should be met.

But young people need more than food, a home and vaccinations: they need hope, which is what education offers, allowing children to plan for the future and preventing young people, already scarred by war, from becoming a "lost generation".

If, through the creation of the Red Cross and later Médecins Sans Frontières, the right to healthcare even in conflict has become the norm for more than a century, then we can achieve the same for education in 2014, and prise open a window of hope amidst the increasing despair.